Sunday, March 28, 2010

Just came back from a meetup and learned a great new trick for this week. Adam showed me a nice double or nothing repeater that incorporates one of my favourite moves, an intercept.

The difficulty in this trick lies in doing it smoothly enough to not snag. There's a whole lot of places where the yoyo could come zipping back at your hands. So if you're learning this one, I'd suggest starting with a dead yoyo, or a VERY unresponsive one.

In the middle of Crackout's excellent video Moloko Velvet, is a fantastic looking boing combo. It's got a bit of slack, and some GT play, making it an instant classic in my books. I actually had to learn over-under boing for this trick. I don't know why, had never thought to learn it. That in itself might not make a good posting, so I've decided to do the entire trick.

The only part with any real difficulty is getting the transition from regular boing to GT boing perfect. It's quite easy to miss that string. Obviously the frontstyle revolution is easy to miss, but that's a matter of practice.

This is one of my facourite repeaters, I was watching Sebastian Brock's Kinetics video and was struck by a really nice and smooth repeater near the end of the video. I fell in love with it and just had to learn it. It almost looks like an alpha-style trick that Doc Pop would do. I don't think I've got quite that flair for it yet, but I'm working on it.

The hardest part of this trick, technically, is to land that slack move over and over consistently, always in the same way. It's also a bit of a mental trick, in that you need to remeber the direction changes. Many times during learning it did I spin the yoyo the wrong way.

All in all, it's an excellent trick, decently easy, and a lot of fun. I highly recommend everyone learn it.

Monday, March 8, 2010

Trick for this week is another simple one as I'm once again gearing up for a very complicated combo. Actually two of them, we'll see which one I master first.

I saw this move in Unagi and immediately knew I wanted to do it. Basically, it's the reverse of a one-handed suicide, hence, reverse suicide (not sure of the real name). In a normal one-handed suicide, you throw the yoyo under your throwhand, it goes above your throw hand, and you catch the look with your throw hand's thumb. This is in fact exactly the opposite. You start from a trapeze around your thumb, rotate the yoyo above your throw hand, it goes below your throw hand, and you catch it with your non-throw-hand index finger.

Pretty simple in theory, fairly difficult in practice. The hard part is the timing for letting go of the loop. Too early, and you'll end up dropping the yoyo or binding, too late and the yoyo will go the wrong direction. Once you nail it, it'll feel awesome.

I've included two shots of me doing it in the video, just because it's hard to capture on camera without some sort of slow mo. I'll look into that, but for now, two shots will have to do.

Friday, March 5, 2010

Well, for the first time since I've started this blog, I'm showing a trick whose name I don't know. It's the second trick in Crackout's Unagi video. The trick starts around 27 seconds in to the video.

This is a pretty awesome tricks for a lot of reasons. Firstly, it's a trick by Crackout that Raytsh hasn't made a tutorial for. Secondly, it starts with a rejection and goes straight into some chopsticks, that takes some balls. Lastly, then last bit with the slack is totally epic and an excellent example of directly manipulating the slack. If done properly it really shows control over both the string and yoyo.

Honestly, if you know how to do all of the individual parts this trick isn't too hard to learn. The beginning rejection is really easy to do if you've ever tried to learn figure 9 (interestingly enough that trick is based off a fighter jet maneuver). In fact you've probably done it accidentally more times than you'd like. The slack just takes some practice to get right and isn't that complicated. The hardest part of the trick is really getting the finger positioning right to do the two pops over your throw hand.

All in all, an awesome trick. I guess I should ask Crackout if the trick has a name.